Issues: Specific graphical UI elements not loading, lag spikes and possibly causing the game to enter a state where it struggle to join a new game until reloaded, on a stable connection and a clean system. Unknown cause.
System: Clean windows 11 install on a clean new drive with a new 3060 and power supply with more than enough to handle it all.
My latest experience was that I had a normal game with a friend. The next game dropped before we could join, 2 3 4 times? I said ok lets reload, as I apparently appeared twice so we can assume there was some issue. Note this is not a typical experience. So we both reloaded HOTS and I invited them into the team, the opposite to the previous game as this can sometime help with issues from past experiences where the server seems to remember teams.
The QM game loaded first time. Great! However I had UI issues from the start that I have seen before under different conditions. (Image available). I also had the occasional lag spikes in the game – typically I rarely get a lag ‘spike’, but this was far more obvious and frequent. Typical lag for me is game dependant and more ‘even’, as in a delay from keypress to action. By lag spike I mean a pause (less than 1sec) followed by things moving fast to catch up. It’s a very different animal.
Back to the graphics. In the past I had windows7 64bit with an old gtx660… I would have what appeared to be graphics crashes ‘rarely’, in a game and it would come back to the same UI glitches (where the dark backgrounds are missing on cooldown timers and some other areas). This can also appears to others, as if you have dropped from the game when this is not ‘exactly’ true. The network was probably 100% fine the entire time. So I suspect the graphical glitching causes a desync that has to be corrected.
So anyways, with a new clean system I am surprised to see the same error without a GPU driver crash on a fresh reload of the game. An additional reload of the game as before fixed the UI issue. But the random lag spikes remained in the following game.
Graphics driver as everyone always asks, is mostly likely the most up-to-date as I installed very recently.
I have noted in the past that having steam open doing nothing can cause a few issues while running HOTS. This remains true on my current system and so steam is closed fully before loading – it’s a thing I do now lol.
The last thing to note is that I use Avast antivirus that my friend will say all sorts of colour full things about when it comes to gaming. I’m happy to add exceptions for HOTS but I need to know what files/folders need adding to the exception list as I have never found information regarding this from a reliable source.
I am not stressing my system at the time of these issues.
I did a fix install, but it said there were no issues.
I look forwards to any insight into fixing or working out what causes these bugs so a fix can be found for all.
I unfortunately do not know a way to consistently trigger the bug but would probably be happy to test it if someone had such a way.